Legal
Who owns the copyright in my website?
Without a written assignment, generally the person who created it — the developer or designer — with you holding an implied licence to use it. Ownership transfers only if the contract says so, which is why the assignment clause matters more than anything else in the agreement.
What a licence does not let you do
- Hand the code to a different developer to modify, on some readings
- Move it to another platform without permission
- Resell it, or sell a business including it, without addressing the rights
- Use it beyond the purpose it was commissioned for
The sentence to ask for
"All intellectual property rights in the deliverables assign to the client on receipt of final payment." Payment-conditional is fair to both sides — you get ownership, the supplier keeps leverage until invoiced work is paid. It costs nothing to include and everything to discover you lacked.
What is reasonably excluded
Third-party components under their own licences, and a supplier’s pre-existing framework or library, are usually licensed rather than assigned. That is standard and not a red flag — the point is that the site-specific work becomes yours.
The longer version
This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, Who actually owns your website — a checklist you can verify today covers it in about 3 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.
Who answered this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.